Cadre Ammunition & Cadre Battle Armor

During a reread of Path just for kicks, I noticed something a little bit... odd.

Cadre fire a 3mm discarding sabot penetrator from their powered armor's attached battle rifle. After her escape from Soisson's, Alicia cut an internal brace from her ammo tank to add an extra 40 rounds of the linkless belted 5mm caseless.


1) If it's linkless, how is it still "belted" ammo?

2) Unless the upper brace Alicia cut away was totally unnecessary in the first place, how it it only 40 extra rounds of 5mm rounds instead of say 100?

5mm is pretty tiny, and from the description in text:

Now she doubled the linkless belt neatly and cheated the last few centimeters into place with an adroit twist of the wrist and a peculiar little lifting motion that slid it up into the void created by a few minutes' work with a cutting torch.

"See? That upper brace is structurally redundant; taking it out makes room for another forty rounds—as we've told the design people for years."

40 rounds of 5mm caseless would be 200mm length, doubled would be only 100mm length by 10mm wide. Which is really damn tiny size for a structural brace. Not to mention an absolutely ridiculous shallow angle which couldn't possibly brace anything.

My math is probably horribly wrong, but a 100mm base/height, with a brace angle of ~45 degrees for good structural strength would be ~141mm long brace. Area of this braced triangle would be ~5000mm, or approximately 100 rounds rather than merely 40.

Somtaaw wrote:40 rounds of 5mm caseless would be 200mm length, doubled would be only 100mm length by 10mm wide. Which is really damn tiny size for a structural brace. Not to mention an absolutely ridiculous shallow angle which couldn't possibly brace anything.

You cannot assume that the projectile diameter is the cartridge diameter. Even allowing for caseless ammunition (which I would take to include ammunition with a case that is consumed in firing, as that would function in the same manner as caseless), there is nothing to prevent its being bottlenecked, which means that the actual diameter of the round could well be greater, even far greater, than the projectile diameter.

AJKohler wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:40 rounds of 5mm caseless would be 200mm length, doubled would be only 100mm length by 10mm wide. Which is really damn tiny size for a structural brace. Not to mention an absolutely ridiculous shallow angle which couldn't possibly brace anything.

You cannot assume that the projectile diameter is the cartridge diameter. Even allowing for caseless ammunition (which I would take to include ammunition with a case that is consumed in firing, as that would function in the same manner as caseless), there is nothing to prevent its being bottlenecked, which means that the actual diameter of the round could well be greater, even far greater, than the projectile diameter.

I can when we actually know the Cadre battle rifle fires a THREE mm sub-calibre round. So the actual bullet is 3mm, and by sub-calibre I assume that means discarding sabot so the 5mm caseless ammo would be the 3mm round + the sleeve+propellants.

And we had a general description of the 3mm rounds, they were needles, so logically they shouldn't be bottlenecked and especially not if they're sub-calibre.


To be honest, from all the descriptions, Cadre battle rifles seem to be closer to smooth-bore tank guns, which also fire discarding sabot (sub-calibre?) rounds of a tungsten-derivative penetrator. Cadre battle rifles are simply 5mm instead of modern MBT's 120mm main guns, but otherwise seem very very similar.

Somtaaw wrote:You cannot assume that the projectile diameter is the cartridge diameter. Even allowing for caseless ammunition (which I would take to include ammunition with a case that is consumed in firing, as that would function in the same manner as caseless), there is nothing to prevent its being bottlenecked, which means that the actual diameter of the round could well be greater, even far greater, than the projectile diameter.

I can when we actually know the Cadre battle rifle fires a THREE mm sub-calibre round. So the actual bullet is 3mm, and by sub-calibre I assume that means discarding sabot so the 5mm caseless ammo would be the 3mm round + the sleeve+propellants.

And we had a general description of the 3mm rounds, they were needles, so logically they shouldn't be bottlenecked and especially not if they're sub-calibre.


To be honest, from all the descriptions, Cadre battle rifles seem to be closer to smooth-bore tank guns, which also fire discarding sabot (sub-calibre?) rounds of a tungsten-derivative penetrator. Cadre battle rifles are simply 5mm instead of modern MBT's 120mm main guns, but otherwise seem very very similar.[/quote]

The 5mm still only designated the bore diameter, not the greatest diameter of the cartridge. It may be linkless, but something holds the belt together, and that, too, adds to the diameter. We can also just presume a small bit of handwavium and not worry about it.

Somtaaw wrote:During a reread of Path just for kicks, I noticed something a little bit... odd.

Cadre fire a 3mm discarding sabot penetrator from their powered armor's attached battle rifle. After her escape from Soisson's, Alicia cut an internal brace from her ammo tank to add an extra 40 rounds of the linkless belted 5mm caseless.

1) If it's linkless, how is it still "belted" ammo?

A 'belted' cartridge has a thickened 'belt' near the cartridge base, used to create the proper headspace within the gun's chamber. Has nothing to do with connecting it to the next cartridge.

5mm is pretty tiny, and from the description in text:

Only a little tinier than 5.56 mm…

Bullet size/mass tells us very little without knowing muzzle velocity. The 'tiny' 5.56 x 45 mm has about 3X the muzzle energy of a 'hefty' .45 ACP with, say, a 220 grain bullet, because it's traveling almost 4X faster. If that battle rifle spews out 3 mm projectiles at, say, 3,000 meters per second, the things would hit harder than .50 BMG rounds.
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'Tis but a flesh wound!

Imaginos1892 wrote:Bullet size/mass tells us very little without knowing muzzle velocity. The 'tiny' 5.56 x 45 mm has about 3X the muzzle energy of a 'hefty' .45 ACP with, say, a 220 grain bullet, because it's traveling almost 4X faster. If that battle rifle spews out 3 mm projectiles at, say, 3,000 meters per second, the things would hit harder than .50 BMG rounds.
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'Tis but a flesh wound!

And if you're shooting at armor you want small bullets. Energy density matters a lot more than total energy.